martes, 11 de agosto de 2009

Gozu

The main plot of Gozu is technically simple: a bunch of weird and crazy crap happens in and between yakuza Minami in search of his brother, Ozaki. You see, Ozaki has gone a little batshit, killing puppies by claiming they’re anti-yakuza dogs. So the search goes on and he meets all sorts of wackos. There’s the crazy people attending a small restaurant who only talk about how hot the day was, the mechanic with the weird skin deformity, and the owners of a hotel who are believers in Japanese witchcraft ceremonies. And of course, the woman in charge milks out of her breast serves it to the customers. Yum.This movie is a joke. And I don’t mean to say that the movie is so bad it’s a joke (like Cat Women Of The Moon), I mean this is Takashi Miike, famous nutbag director from Japan, playing a joke on us. You see, a lot of people seem to be disturbed by this movie. I’d say they’re disturbed at one scene in particular, but more on that later. This movie is basically the answer to ‘what would it be like if David Lynch made a gross-out comedy?” and a lot of people don’t seem to get it. There’s body jokes of all kinds, from puke to shit to breast milk. There’s a yakuza that only gets it hard when he gets a kitchen spoon shoved up his ass, and there’s a man-cow hybrid that wears white undies. What’s not funny about that?You might be asking yourself, what was that disturbing scene you mentioned? Well I’m not going to go into details since I don’t want to spoil it, but Minami does find his brother Ozaki, only now Ozaki is a woman. Take a minute to digest that. After they dispatch of their yakuza boss, she ‘gives birth’ so to speak. I don’t want to say anything else, it’s just too fucked up to believe and I felt it was hilarious as well, especially thanks to the facial expressions. The last shot of a laughing Japanese man, straight to the camera, STRAIGHT AT US, reveals the punchline. If you don’t get it, then you never will.